“Torrence?” I questioned, feeling a wrinkle form between my eyebrows.
“It’s a Bring It On reference,” John remarked casually as he stretched out his hamstring by pulling his heel to his ass, as though it wasn’t weird that he’d know that.
When I turned my curiosity from Thatch to him, he piped up again.
“What? Kirsten Dunst is in the movie, and she’s fucking hot.” He added, “And I have a younger sister,” when the group was slow to buy in.
“How is your sister, Johnny?” Thatch asked with a smirk.
John’s eyes flashed brightly before turning to stone. “Eighteen, motherfucker.”
Thatch turned to me, and I could practically see what was coming. He didn’t actually want to bone John’s little sister. Not even a little.
“What’s that he said, Kline?”
He might have been a manwhore, but Thatch fucked women—not girls just starting to make the transition. What he wanted was to poke at one of John’s pressure points just enough to make him explode.
I trained my face to look serious and held in a laugh. “I think he said she’s legal, Thatch.”
John lunged and my humor finally broke the surface. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and shoved him away playfully while Thatch busted out in hysterics beside me.
“Relax, John,” Wes coaxed. “Thatch doesn’t need your sister to fill his * punch card. He’s got all the tramps he’ll ever need right here in Manhattan.”
Thatch tsked. “There’s no card, Wes. My dick is not a Value Club.”
“It sure fucks in bulk,” John threw in, eager to even the score because of some running feud between the two of them. We were all well-off, grown-as-fuck men, but you’d be surprised by how similar we were to a group of teenage girls sometimes.
“And how would you know, Johnny? Got a camera in my bedroom?” Thatch snapped back.
“All right,” I called, babysitting like usual. “Drama club is over, assholes. Let’s go play rugby. Focus all of that energy into your attack, for fuck’s sake.”
“You’re the one who can’t manage to make it past halfway without getting tackled and steamrolled into the ground,” Wes pointed out. He laughed as he said it, though, continuing the teasing vibe by wrapping his arm around my shoulders and walking out onto the field with me.
“At least I manage to touch the ball every once in a while,” I jabbed back, shoving him away and jogging to the other side of the pitch.
At this point in the season, practice consisted mostly of scrimmages, dividing into two teams and trying to outplay each other. I was just glad that when we split up, Thatch was usually on my side. He might have acted like a clown from time to time, but the dude was one big motherfucker and had been known to do some permanent damage when he tackled you. I liked to walk without a limp, and if I was going to be told I couldn’t have kids one day, I sure as fuck didn’t want testicle mutilation to be the reason.
I shook out of my daydream when the ball slammed into my chest, a smirk ghosting Wes’s lips from the success of his unexpected pass.
I took off at a run, dodging a defender and reaching the halfway line. Pain shot through my waist as another defender made hard contact. I tossed the ball underhanded and toward my back, the only direction allowed for a legal pass in rugby, and tucked my arms to my chest to take the impact of the fall without breaking a wrist.
“Jesus,” I groaned, shoving Tommy off of me as quickly as I could in order to rejoin play.
“Lay off the cookies, Tom,” I shouted as I ran toward the ruck my teammates had going.
“Weights!” he yelled back. “I think when you said cookies, you meant weights!”
And fuck, by the way my spleen throbbed, Tommy just might have been right.
I slammed my body into the linked shoulders of Thatch and Wes, pushing them forward over the loose ball and helping the group gain momentum in the fight upstream against the defenders. Thatch fought for control in front of me, and I nearly took an elbow to the face in the process.
Rugby was a rough game, and when my organs felt like they might fall out or a limb ached like it might fall off, I wondered why I did it.
But then the ball was in my arms again, tossed underhand and over his shoulder by Thatch, and I remembered without question—the adrenaline, the thrill, the all-out expulsion of a week’s worth of tension, stress, and aggression.
I was convinced a little extracurricular rugby not only kept me in prime physical shape, but it also kept my mind at peace and on an even keel. I could only hope that as my physical health started to subside with age, my need to vent would dwindle along with it.